Shakespeare: A

Why is it that movies like Shakespeare in Love, Romeo and Juliette (with Leonard DiCaprio and Clair Danes), 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, and other films about the Bard and his plays are so popular when so many students dread the word “Shakespeare”? Tell a class of students they will be reading a play, and you will hear groans that would make you think the cafeteria had given everyone food poisoning. But, make a hit television show like House of Cards that is full of characters and situations from Macbeth, and you will make millions. It begs the question, how do you teach students to read Shakespeare’s texts without traumatizing them? Clearly, the content of the plays is enjoyable, so how to you circumnavigate the language?

When I was an undergrad, I did a senior project that attempted to answer that question. Over my tenure in the classroom, I’ve built on that initial research and have what I believe is a very successful approach to teaching these texts even at the middle school level. The answer is don’t circumnavigate the language, teach it; teach it like a foreign language so that the students can read it and understand it. Impossible, you say? Poppy cock!

Below is a concise “Introduction” to my revised “How to Teach Shakespeare” research. In college, it was titled “A Method to the Madness,” a paraphrase we steal from Shakespeare. I’m not going to post my entire project, but occasionally, I would like to share my teaching techniques in the hopes that others may be able to use them in their English classrooms.

 

Shakespeare’s plays are staples of English curricula at all levels around the country. And while English teachers relish these texts, students often approach the plays with hesitation or even distaste. Reading Shakespeare is unquestionably difficult, but it should not be painful.

This is a list of activities, projects, and methods teachers can use when they are addressing a Shakespearean play. I have used these ideas for the last five years with three different Shakespearean comedies in eighth grade classes, and I find my students leaving the unit with excitement about the Bard and having a sense of power in reading new texts in subsequent years.

I’ve chosen to organize these thoughts in ABC order, creating an ABC book of techniques for teaching Shakespearean texts to middle or high school students. This is not a unit plan, and these ideas are not to be taught in this sequence. This is a reference for teachers to pick and choose strategies that will meet specific goals and groups of students, but these ideas are applicable to any comedy, tragedy, or history since the philosophy behind this alphabet book is how to read, and enjoy, Shakespeare.

An Alphabet Book for All

ABC books are given to young children to help them learn their letters. However, creating an alphabet book for a Shakespearean play is a very advanced task, and therefore, any Shakespearean unit could include an ABC book project. Think about any play; what is an aspect of that play that starts with A, with B, with K, with Q, with U…it’s a tall order.

To challenge students to really know a play, you can ask them to maintain or create an ABC book for the entire play. They will have one page, or half page, about a piece of the play that starts with all 26 letters. This will result in students’ understanding, or at least recognizing, 26 different characters, themes, settings, conflicts, etc in the play.

I prefer to make a class alphabet book. I randomly assign each student a letter, and that student must create a two-page spread that closely examines one element starting with that letter, using direct quotes, images, symbols, charts, as well as written paragraphs. Some students choose the obvious topics, like names of characters. However, this project frequently leads to the realization that Shakespeare includes so much more in his plays: weddings, farce, puns, slapstick, animals, arguments, relationships, rivals, violence, and so much more. The unit ends with each class having one detailed alphabet book. (See letter E for more about textual analysis.)

NOTE: This ABC project can be done with almost any subject you may be teaching: chemical elements, math concepts, pieces of the Civil War, musicians, almost anything.

Check back for more of this project; I will post sections of this piece from time to time for those interested in this pedagogy.

Simply Superb Sponges

I’m sure you’ve heard the cliché that kids are sponges that soak up everything they see and hear.  You might be especially familiar with this cliché if you have children of your own because you may have had to curb your swearing after your beautiful baby girl-turned toddler yelled “damn it” when she dropped her pudding.  Language acquisition is fascinating with amazing statistics about how your five-year-old can genuinely absorb something like twenty new words every day; that’s over 7,000 words in a single year.  Unsurprisingly, that number declines rapidly as we age, in part because we don’t hear twenty new words each day and in part because we aren’t all Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory with infinite storage in our brains.  I’ve read that at the middle school level, my students can still genuinely learn eight new words each week, but to do that, they need to hear the words, see the words, use the words, and create meaning with the words, as if they were five.  That’s why they pay me the big bucks, and perhaps at a later time, I’ll reveal my secrets for how I accomplish that learning feat.

But language acquisition isn’t really what I wanted to discuss.  I am continually reminded of the sponge metaphor even though my students are young adults because in a way we’re all still sponges.  Who among us hasn’t heard a fantastic joke on TV or in person and retold it to a group of friends?  Who can’t retell a particularly awesome scene of a movie or thrilling play their favorite sports team pulled off?  We see things, and part of our brain changes, maybe ever so slightly, but I think it does change.

And that’s one reason I have museum days in my class, days that I adore and part of the reason teaching middle school is preferable to any other level.  When I assign a project, I don’t want to be the lone audience, but creating an audience of peers can be difficult.  So, the day any project is due, all students display their work in the classroom and the entire period is spent in a scavenger hunt that requires all students to look at their classmates’ work.  Bam, genuine audience of peers.  Knowing that their classmates are going to peruse their work means that I no longer get crayon designs and a single piece of tape holding everything together.  If I taught younger students, I doubt they would care as much if their classmates liked their work; they seem to be teacher-pleasers in the elementary schools.

Reason 2 that I love museum days is that it allows students to absorb in their sponge-like ways their classmates’ creative ideas.  I know that there are parents who “help” too much, but regardless, by seeing what is possible, my students are often motivated to push themselves further on the next project and to emulate the best in the class.  When everyone has the same assignment, but everyone ends up with such different final products, students see that there are many ways to interpret and to accomplish the same goal, and I watch it drive their creativity on subsequent projects.  At a younger level, I’m not sure if the balance of student-parent work would be equal enough to merit spending class time to examine, and even if it were balanced, the students are too young to notice creative differences or to learn from them.

Students do textual analysis for one topic in a Shakespeare play. Displayed around the room in ABC order for Museum Day.

Reason 3 that I love museum days is that I design the scavenger hunt to act as a review for the unit’s content.  If we are studying Shakespeare, students look at their classmates’ projects to find facts that I will be testing; they have to find the answer and cite which project gave them the answer.  They enjoy looking at their friends’ work, and I know that they are reviewing important content while engaged.  If I taught high school, such a class activity would probably seem juvenile.  What sixteen-year-old wants to find an example of personification in a classmate’s poem? But if I call it a “scavenger hunt,” my thirteen-year-old students are instantly tricked and forget that they are doing work.

And the final reason that I love museum days is it makes grading much easier.  I’m a pretty busy person and projects are usually bulky and impossible to take home to grade.  While my students are on their scavenger hunt, enjoying the creative work they see, I am grading.  If you design a good enough rubric, you can quickly evaluate the level of success each project attains.  In a forty-minute period, I can usually grade between fifteen and twenty projects.  I am not carting home giant posters or scrapbooks or dioramas; I am evaluating during the class period and saving myself hours of work.

Now that I’ve convinced you that museum days are the best for students and teachers, let me share some of the brilliant ideas my students have showcased so you can see why I love teaching eighth grade.  I had a student build a refrigerator out of cardboard, with trays in the doors and everything to display his work.  I had a student engineer a flag to project from the center of his project with string while still allowing for the project to lay flat for transportation.  I’ve seen duct tape used in every possible way you could imagine, to decorate backgrounds, to create 3-D people and objects, to outline, for barbed wire; the uses of duct tape are truly endless.  Students have melted crayons and attached the remaining half crayon as well as used the melted wax as a drizzled decoration.  Projects that collapse often have door handles to open them (and by door handles I mean drink bottles, rope, pine cones, and anything else you could hold and pull).  There are flashing lights with on-off switches and music that plays because the student ripped out the inside of a signing card.  There are pop-ups and pull-outs and even a pack of tissues attached to one project in case it made me cry.

LA Clue: What Happened to Edgar Allan Poe? Students created a “Clue” style board game with a layout of our school. The “players” are various authors including Shakespeare.

It’s important to share with you the trials I’ve faced in my classrooms and my frustrations, but I need you to see the beauty of being thirteen as well.  I need you to see this tender balance between childhood, sponge-like absorbing of knowledge and adult creativity and brilliance.  This must be one of the few times in a person’s life when they can still learn like a child but start learning what adults should know, not yet jaded, still impressionable.  Museum days make me feel like I make a difference.